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Best known as the director of the Heisei Gamera trilogy and Godzilla, Mothra & King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (2001), Shusuke Kaneko was interested in science fiction, particularly Godzilla films, from a young age. He joined Nikkatsu Studios after graduating college and acted as an assistant director for numerous "roman porno" films. He directed his first movie, Koichiro Uno's Wet and Shooting, in 1984. His first film to achieve critical success, both in Japan and outside, would be his 1988 film Summer Vacation: 1999. After creating the fun vampire flick My Soul Is Slashed in 1991, Kaneko, working for the first time in America, directed a segment of the horror anthology Necronomicon. He then got the chance to direct Gamera: Guardian of the Universe (1995), the first entry in the Heisei Gamera series. It was a huge critical success and led to a sequel: Gamera 2: Advent of Legion (1996), which was as critically acclaimed, if not more so, than the first film. Kaneko then went all out for the third and final film in the trilogy: Gamera 3: Revenge of Iris (1999), creating a film which many fans have given great praise, in both Japan and the West. He then directed the horror film Pyrokinesis (2000) before returning to the kaiju genre for Godzilla, Mothra & King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (2001). In 2005, he directed the sequel to Ryuhei Kitamura's sword film Azumi: Azumi 2: Death or Love and his next film, a horror flick entitled God's Left Hand, Devil's Right Hand was released in Japan in 2006.